Information & Decision Sciences

Professor Aris Ouskel has been awarded a NSF grant in the High-Risk High-Reward program (SGER) for research in the area of Emergency Management, Logistics and Homeland Security. This is the third NSF grant Professor Ouksel has received since 1983. The title of the proposal and an extract from the motivation are provided below.

"Resource Management amongst Autonomous Command Centers in Mobile Environments"

Consider the following scenario: an earthquake hits downtown LA. A substantial number of buildings have been destroyed. Evacuation and rescue are primary concerns. Traffic capacity is reduced due to accidents, ruptured water mains, and unsafe bridges. Fires (combustibles, fuel, electrical) are reported in scattered locations. Many residents are likely to be seriously injured; others are believed trapped inside damaged buildings. Criminal activity is feared, against both businesses and individuals. Rapid response is essential. Multiple mobile autonomous integrated command centers have been deployed in the city, each with its own geographic area of responsibility, to coordinate allocation and dispatch of heterogeneous resources, including medical, police, fire, and military mobile units composed of vehicles, equipment, and personnel, to the various critical activity points in the city.

We argue that in such scenarios, it is likely that any preinstalled infrastructure is non-existent or destroyed. To share data about injured people, destroyed buildings, or other resources, a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) may offer the only communication means for the rescue teams. Critical in this environment is the availability of information dissemination and discovery protocols with predictable efficiency and effectiveness guarantees within geographical areas to insure the viability of tactical or strategic rescue plans.

This SGER project aims at developing novel methodologies for the design of information dissemination and discovery routing protocols to support coordination management in large heterogeneous mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), incorporating reliability measures, performance and trust-aware guarantees into their formulations. The impact of this project is very high as the results will enable successful deployment of the next generation of MANETs and the design of highly scalable management systems, which will support a wide spectrum of applications ranging from homeland security, emergency and crisis management, disaster recovery, military battlefield coordination, transportation, as well as complex social applications such as distributed gaming and the management of distributed learning services.